Zero-hours Contracts
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Introduction
This summer in the United Kingdom (UK), ‘zero-hours contracts’ grabbed the headlines and dominated discussion about changes to working life. Zero-hours contracts are those in which a worker agrees to be available for work with a particular employer but without any guaranteed hours or times of work and therefore usually no guaranteed pay either. Under these contracts employers only need to pay for work when they need it. These contracts are not a new phenomenon, although the scale of their current use in the UK is unprecedented. This is seen by employers and ministers as part of the ‘necessary’ flexible labour market.
Who benefits from flexibility?
The Conservative-dominated British government boasts the UK is on the road to economic recovery and that, even at the worst point of the crisis, the private sector created hundreds of thousands of jobs which compensated for the impact of austerity on public sector employment. What ministers never explain is the nature of these new private sector jobs or how the crisis has been used to restructure the labour market. The increase in forms of ‘flexible’ work is closely related to the attacks on workers’ rights and trade unions. Thatcher began the process of weakening the position of workers, through legislative change to the labour markets and through laws which made it more difficult for unions to engage in legal strikes. This assault continued under the Blair and Brown ‘new Labour’ governments (Blair boasted that the UK had the least regulated labour market of any major industrialised country). The current British government has pushed even harder to remove legal protections for workers and to discourage the use of remaining legal protections by increasing the costs of bringing a case
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